Love Quote by Gertrude Stein

Stein’s line reads like a typo that’s secretly a trap: it yanks you toward a familiar, sentimental idea (music as national feeling) and then flips it into something uglier and more honest. “What is music.” lands with that characteristically Steinian deadpan, a faux-naive question that refuses to behave like a polite definition. The abruptness is the point. She’s not clarifying; she’s exposing how quickly “culture” gets drafted into politics.

Calling music “a passion for colonies” frames it as an engine of expansion rather than belonging. It’s a brutal demotion of patriotism: not “love of country” (a rooted, reciprocal attachment) but a craving to possess, to annex, to reproduce the self in other places. In that reading, music becomes a soft weapon. It travels easily, seduces without argument, and can smuggle hierarchy under the cover of beauty. Stein’s modernist suspicion of inherited forms is doing geopolitical work here: art isn’t innocent, and the institutions that canonize it often ride alongside empire.

The clipped syntax also mimics a kind of authoritarian shorthand, the way propaganda reduces complex attachments into slogans. Stein’s sentence refuses lyrical closure; it stays jagged, making the reader feel the fracture between what nations claim to be (community, tradition) and what they often do (extract, dominate). Written by an American expatriate in Europe, living through the age of modernist experimentation and imperial aftershocks, the remark lands as both aesthetic critique and political diagnosis: music doesn’t just express a nation. It can rehearse its appetite.